A Republican without a party

Joseph Britt: “The party of Trump is the party of the Charlottesville white-right mob.”

For one longtime committed Republican, the midterm election results proved to be “modestly encouraging” — because of how well the Democrats did.

Joseph Britt of Sun Prairie spent a couple of decades working for Republicans, including for U.S. Sen. Bob Kasten and Justice David Prosser, when Prosser was the state Assembly Republican leader in the early 1990s. But Britt, who has worked in the private sector since the mid-1990s, has grown increasingly disenchanted with the Republican Party and its leaders over the past two decades.

Britt has been sharing his political change of heart with friends and on social media for a while, but with a 25-part tweetstorm on Oct. 8 he made a complete break with the GOP, declaring “I’m out.”

“What is there left of Lincoln in today’s Republican Party? Of Theodore Roosevelt? Nothing,” Britt wrote in the penultimate tweet from that thread. “The party of Trump is the party of the Charlottesville white-right mob, the party of concentrated wealth, and perhaps most of all the party that rejects responsibility.”

His digital cri de coeur generated more than 11,000 retweets and more than three times as many likes. It multiplied the number of followers he has a startling sevenfold, he says, now reaching 5,600 at last count.

Britt may be unknown to people outside a coterie of Republican insiders, but he offers a peek into a politically engaged group that once played a significant role in the GOP but now feels isolated with President Donald Trump as the new face of the party.

Britt backed Tony Evers this year and never voted for Walker, who he says governed as a “proto-Trump, zealously serving his largest campaign donors, catering generally to his most vocal supporters, and mostly ignoring the rest of the state.”

His scorn for Trump is even stronger. On Facebook in May 2016, he predicted that voters that coming November would reject the GOP nominee as a “rank racist,” “a blinkered bigot” toward Hispanics and Muslims, “a pig” to women, and one who “embodies in extreme form the entitlement of wealth that encumbers our whole national life.”

Earlier this year, he admitted his forecast was way off, but stood by his characterization of Trump, claiming the president’s real strength came from “habitual Republican voters” who had backed Mitt Romney in 2012, John McCain in 2008 and George W. Bush twice. Although these loyal Republicans are “some of the most prosperous, economically secure people who have ever lived anywhere in the history of the world,” he wrote, they yearned for “expression of their resentment” against African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, environmentalists, feminists, government workers and journalists.

For the 60-year-old Britt, the GOP is all but unrecognizable from the one that caught his attention while he was growing up on Long Island in a modest middle-class community. He says he was a political junkie in a largely non-political family by the time he was a teenager. A few years after college he went to work on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide, eventually joining Kasten’s office to specialize in agricultural policy. Traveling around Wisconsin for meetings with Kasten’s farm advisors, he grew to love the Dairy State and eagerly returned to work for Prosser and settle down here a few years later.

A “big fan of Ronald Reagan,” Britt admired people like U.S. Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas for his pragmatic productivity as Senate leader, and U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana for his willingness to immerse himself in such issues as arms control. He didn’t care for President Bill Clinton, but neither was he a fan of the Republican House Speaker who was Clinton’s nemesis.

“I loathed Newt Gingrich personally,” says Britt. “He wasn’t as interested as much in achieving things for the country as he was in scheming out the next campaign and getting his people into power.”

One of Britt’s souvenirs from “time raising money on the phone for the Republican National Committee.”

Gingrich weakened Congress as an institution, he contends, diminishing congressional policy advisors in favor of campaign donors who now have greater sway on elected officials.

Britt regrets voting for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 because of the ensuing disasters for the country, including the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina. He then voted twice for Barack Obama. The racial animus behind Republican opposition to the first black president “was a pretty important part of my estrangement to the party.”

Trump in the White House has realized Britt’s worst expectations. In his October Twitter thread, the one-time GOP loyalist declared himself an independent and vowed to vote Democratic “whenever possible.”

The midterm elections last week gave Britt hope for the country, Britt tells Isthmus. Now that Democrats have control of the House, they can “check the Trump administration’s abuses of power.” In Wisconsin, “they regained some ability to rebuild decimated state government and set priorities more worthy than rewarding large campaign donors or winning praise on AM talk radio.”

But politics, he believes, should be merely a means to an end — effective government. History, he says, is mostly “something that happens in between election campaigns, not the other way around.”

The challenges he finds most alarming — yet overlooked by many voters — are severe: the nation’s continued fall in its global standing under Trump, the federal executive branch’s retreat from the rule of law, and the relentless march of climate change with no meaningful response from the American government.

“From that standpoint, we were in big trouble before the voting last Tuesday, and we’re in big trouble now,” Britt says.

He doesn’t believe his old party will ever address those problems, however. “There does not seem to be any such thing anymore as a non-Trump Republican. It may be the case that this kind of Republican died when John McCain did,” he says. Meanwhile, the current leaders, moving in the wrong direction long before Trump, show no signs of changing course. “The entire GOP, as of this moment, is lined up behind him. This is a profoundly dangerous situation.”